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Quote To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.[/QUOTE] Sun Tzu
If MTW is played using the Agents Mod. or without any attention being paid to the non-military units provided there will be a tendency for the AI to adopt the Hojo Horde strategy both in defence and attack. Amassing huge stacks of units in key bottleneck provinces which seek to block expansion and eventually overwhelm your defences.
I've found that the best strategy to avoid this situation and to overcome it when it occurs is to use subversion to undermine the AI's own resource provinces and make them to disperse their forces.
I found the best way to do this in my Almohead (Early/Normal) campaign was as follows:
1. Use Religious units to monitor the activity within foreign provinces. These units tend to be ignored by the AI and yet serve the double purpose of reporting on the status of the enemy whilst converting the population gradually to your own religion. By now I have at least one Alim in every province on the board and so I can see everything that my Allies and Enemies are up to and the only way they can prevent this is by training assassins. Once the number of Muslim converts begins to reach 30%+ you will begin to get Muslim rebellions occurring in your rivals provinces.
2. Defend your own religion vigorously. Any bishop wandering into my empire is ruthlessly hunted down and murdered by my assassins. I have built Assassin training centres in one key none troop producing province in each area of my empire and try to maintain a stock of five trained assassins on call at each centre. As soon as a bishop crosses the border one of the nearest assassins is targeted on them and hunts them down automatically. Once targeted I leave the Assassin alone to stalk and kill his prey rather than moving them all by hand. The only time I interfere is when the bishop ducks back across the border in which case I try and rescue the Assassin before a Border fort kills him. Once the stock of Assassins gets low I train another five and start again.
I also keep at least one Alim on permanent prayer duty in every one of my own provinces just to ensure that my population does not get converted in too great a number. I find the critical number seems to be about 30% so I try to keep Muslim worship levels well above this if I can. If you don't then their loyalty begins to drop and you run the risk of religious rebellions in your own domains.
3. Spread Rebellion and Unrest: This is the sole use I make of my spies. I keep a force of at least 10 spy's constantly on hand for subversion missions. I find that 10 spies can normally be relied upon to trigger a revolt in any but the most heavily defended provinces. Be prepared to lose a lot of spies, as any province with a border fort will take one out per turn. But if you send in enough at once it only take one turn to trigger the revolt. Use your religious network to plan your route checking for the existence of border forts en-route and moving your subversion force province to province leaving a trail of rebellions in your wake.
4. Diplomacy: Emissaries are the final agents in the set and I try to keep one emissary in contact with each of the foreign rulers plus few to deal with princesses. The religious network means I always know where the other factions rulers are and so its easy to keep an emissary permanently in contact with them and it means I can request a cease fire or an alliance every turn if I so wish. I also propose to every princess that crosses my border (it seems to scare them off) and any that belong to factions that appear to be in trouble just in case I get to inherit their lands.
Some examples of how I put these idea's to good use in my current campaign:
1. In the early period the French began sending crusades against my Iberian provinces. They also had massive armies stationed on the border. A subversion force of 10 spies performed a curcuit of their troop producing provinces as identified by my Alim's triggering massive rebellions in their lightly defended heartland. Large numbers of troops had to move to retake these provinces but even so some were snapped up by the English changing the balance of power and leaving France little more than a buffer state between the English and myself.
2. The Silicians were competing with me for control of the trade routes in the Med. They were producing ships faster than I could sink them and disrupting my income. Using my religious network I plotted a route from Aragon to Constantinople and compensating for the number of spies I would lose en-route marched a subversion force along the coast causing rebellions in every Sicilian ship building province. Some of these rebellions were so large that the Sicilians still haven't retaken their land. The supply of ships dried up and I now control the Med. More importantly I can still trade with the rebels and so have not lost any trade income as a result.
3. Many of the Northern provinces are now nearing 50% Muslim conversion and religious rebellions are becoming quite common. Its worth noting though that religious rebellions tend to be far weaker than peasant revolts and also tend to consist of odd unit mixes (like 100% Artillery) so I avoid converting too many peasants in provinces where I might want to create a rebel state as I have yet to see a religious rebellion actually take a province.
Using these strategies it is possible to monitor the entire map, spot other factions that are likely to become a threat and undermine their development before they can launch an overwhelming invasion.
Your own armies can just sit back and watch the fun or nip in to snatch up a newly liberated province or two without triggering a war.
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Didz
Fortis balore et armis
[This message has been edited by Didz (edited 10-14-2002).]
[This message has been edited by Didz (edited 10-14-2002).]
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What is the Agents mod? From your description, it seems all the agents are in there. So I'm wondering what the Agents mod does.
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I'm also curious. Please enlighten us :P
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Quote Originally posted by Pragmatic:
What is the Agents mod? From your description, it seems all the agents are in there. So I'm wondering what the Agents mod does.[/QUOTE]
I'm afraid someone else will have to explain exactly what it does as I don't use it. But judging from other threads it appears to remove all non-military units from the game so you don't have to bother with them.
The problem then is that you tend to get the Hojo Horde effect occurring as the AI does not have to worry about your agents and can't build its own.
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Didz
Fortis balore et armis
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its ECS's no agents mod theres no spys, bishops, assassins, inquisitors, iman's cardinals etc
there are only princess's & emmissaries
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yes, didz is right on. spies are defintely the key to bringing down huge enemies. in an italian campaign where i remained isolationist and built up my provinces to elite levels, first ALMOs seemed to be the superpower, but by placing spies in their southern cash territories and then throughout the iberian penn, they were NOTHING within years. then spain tried to overstep its bounds, and soon got swallowed by the russians (along with a few key provinecs invaded by yours truly)...
also, spies might be handy in pushing two nations into war. sometimes a rebellion will be a loyalist one and send the two nations into war.
